Senior Research Seminar with Professor Guido Sprenger (Heidleberg University)

Professor Guido Sprenger (Heidleberg University)

Expectations of the gift and the introduction of Buddhist endowments

This talk presents and tentatively applies an approach to transactions that is based on their future orientation. Replacing the Maussian obligations with expectations offers a perspective on exchanges that helps to account for the diverging outcomes of different types of transactions, such as commodity trade or gift exchange. Gift exchange differs from commodity trade in the range of expectations, that is, possible futures that an initial transfer engenders. While a single transaction in commodity trade is based on strong and focused expectations, gift exchange creates diffuse and weak expectations, that is, more contingent and multiple ones. Both types of transaction involve a moral horizon of actors who give, receive, witness or endorse the transaction, in order to realize its concomitant expectations. The moral horizon thus implies an imagination of “society” while at the same time being based on the difference between givers and receivers. This model is applied to the arrival of Buddhist temples in previously non-Buddhist communities in Laos. Endowments thus appear as a specific type of gifting that exemplifies society as a future-oriented project.